In recent years, the public Internet has become a tremendous resource for information seekers and information providers. Unfortunately, so much information is available that information seekers often find it exceptionally difficult to find desired information. Information providers, on the other hand, are faced with the challenges of making their information content easily accessible and locatable.
As the internet is distributed, no central authority exists to track and index available information. Nevertheless, many private information indexing and searching tools (often referred to as “search engines”) have become available. Some of these rely on administrators to organize indices of available information; others automatically search the internet for information, categorize located content, and index it for searching.
These available search engines provide only limited solace to the information seekers. Still, much information goes un-indexed. More difficult still, most search engines require searchers to formulate an appropriate query, which typically requires some knowledge of a Boolean algebra. The quality of results is governed by the quality of the query. Often, poorly formulated queries yield too many or too few results. Further, the lay operator is typically unable to formulate the ideal query, and is often frustrated by the number of iterations required to locate the desired information.
Privately administered Internet sites often suffer from the same indexing shortcoming as the Internet at large. Many large organizations make tremendous volumes of information available by way of an interconnected Internet server, or an Intranet server. As each of these private information repositories grows in sizes so do the problems with searching, indexing and retrieving information indexing at that site. As a consequence many Internet sites include their own privately administered search engines. As such, once interested site visitors are at the site believed to have the desired information, they can rely on a conventional search engine that searches content only at that site.
This too, however, may be frustrating for site visitors: they have located the site leaving the information of interest, but must still hunt for the information they desire. Again, queries must typically be formed using Boolean terms, and results returned by the search engines may be too numerous or inadequate. Most organizations are attuned to the difficulties in making their information easily available.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved search and indexing methods and software allowing desired information to be easily and unequivocally located.